Results tagged “trends” from Trends in the Living Networks

In his excellent book The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin asks when in human history you would most like to be alive.

For me there is no question that it is now. The coming decade will be the most exciting in human history. The very challenging year of 2009 that we are preparing to bid farewell to helped to tear up the fairly linear progress of the first decade of the century. Now, technological and social change are poised to accelerate far beyond what we have become accustomed to.

A critical uncertainty is how well we will respond to this extraordinary pace of change, both as individuals and as societies. Will we be able to adapt and change, or will severe dysfunctions emerge? Just one dimension is the manifold ethical dilemmas that are raised by gaining extraordinary technological capabilities.

Here are the ten trends that I believe will be most fundamental to the decade ahead. I hope to present these and associated trends in an interactive visual format before long. For now, here are the 10 trends for 2010.

1. Information Intensity
We will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.

I earlier posted the Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media framework below, which was one of the frameworks included in our Future of Media Report 2008. However the framework is designed to cover an A3 sheet, so while it looks great in the printed copy of the report it can be hard to read on a screen. In addition many people don't click through to pdfs. So I've posted this content in a blog-friendly and more readable format below.

Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media (pdf 700KB):

Since the event I've heard that the seven driving forces have been used in a range of presentations inside organizations and at conferences, and also in some executive strategy sessions. Before I created the visual summary of the trends I'd used them in a variety of client offsites and found they were useful in framing strategic thinking, all of which suggests it's worth providing these again in a more accessible format.

If you like this framework, also see our Future of the Media Lifecyle Framework and Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework.

SEVEN DRIVING FORCES SHAPING MEDIA

1. Increasing Media Consumption

Humans are intrinsically media animals. As we get greater access to media and content, we are discovering that our appetite for information and entertainment is virtually insatiable. It is commonplace for people of all ages to consume multiple media at the same time, with television, internet, newspaper, messaging, and other media frequently overlapping.

Implications:
Average total media consumption will exceed waking hours. Most media will be consumed with partial attention. Advertising impact will decrease.